Our first time in Chinatown. We choose this place because of its nice decor and ambiance. The interior is appeasing. The waitresses were friendly. But  they barely spoke any English, maybe the management can consider having someone on site who can communicate with English speaking diners. We ordered the house specialty Spicy Fish in Pan. Bad judgement. EXTREMELY SALTY. Maybe they dropped the bottle of salt accidentally because the other reviews seemed to like the dish. Our other items included the Dry Chilli Prawn and Noodles with Shrimp. The latter was nice. The former was okay. The pan of fish went all back in the kitchen. They did offer to dilute the salt with more water though.
Review Source:First of all, the bathroom did not have soap so I was told to wash my hands in the kitchen by a server. They did not have access to the soap. The service was slow. We ordered two dishes, prawns and chicken. Though the prawns were spicy and good, we had to keep asking for napkins as they would bring two at a time (there were three of us). I'm happy we ate in Chinatown but would choose a different restaurant.
Review Source:When I first walked in I was surprised about how modern and urban the place looked. Very chic. They did a really nice job in the interior design aspect.
To eat, I had the spicy frog legs in a soup and it was delicious! I also had the sausages and chicken feet (my first time trying chicken feet, and it wasn't bad at all!). The service was very attentive and polite. I don't have any complaints. I will go here again for sure.
I can't handle spicy food. It annoys me to no end that I hark from a land that boast the spiciest food in the world and yet my body rebels at the mere scent of spicy. I am an embarrassment to my people. Â
Given my inability to tolerate spicy cuisine, I probably had no business convincing a group of friends to dine at Lao Ma La. Â After all, Ma La is Chinese for "numbingly spicy." I am no sadomasochist; I just happen to like spicy food even if my body can't handle it.
The day of the dinner I armed myself with a towel to sop up the inevitable streams of sweat and a pack of tissues to combat the likely runny nose. I was ready to take on Lao Numbingly Spicy. Â
The restaurant was fairly empty on a Thursday evening. Most of the other patrons seemed to be eating the hotpot. We opted to do a family style meal and ordered three appetizers and four main courses.
The food proved to be as spicy as advertised and my towel came in handy. I enjoyed the meal despite enduring merciless ribbing from my friends. I was able to take solace in the fact that the best received dish of the evening was my choice: the House Special Fish with Green Chilies. The Stewed Pork Belly with Dried Bean Curd <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/lao-ma-la-chicago?select=FyH5O6QxNwulFBFP0b8-vA#FyH5O6QxNwulFBFP0b8-vA">http://www.yelp.com/biz_…</a> was a close second. From the appetizers, the Wood Ear Mushroom with Wild Chili <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/lao-ma-la-chicago?select=FyH5O6QxNwulFBFP0b8-vA#aUF8yBxcTInR8LdplicoOQ">http://www.yelp.com/biz_…</a> and the Never Forget Chicken <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/lao-ma-la-chicago?select=FyH5O6QxNwulFBFP0b8-vA#wc1f1knQsGQ59WLzAenvCg">http://www.yelp.com/biz_…</a> were also standouts.  The bizarrely named Husband Wife Lung Slices, thin slices of beef brisket and tripe coated with a spicy Szechuan sauce, <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/lao-ma-la-chicago?select=FyH5O6QxNwulFBFP0b8-vA#JPEwVYwts7-McQtz26S_gA">http://www.yelp.com/biz_…</a> was also surprisingly good.
The Hot and Sour Vermicelli <a href="http://www.yelp.com/biz_photos/lao-ma-la-chicago?select=FyH5O6QxNwulFBFP0b8-vA#7uPxoem5ij9dwnE55qufGg">http://www.yelp.com/biz_…</a> had the distinct honor of being the spiciest dish of the evening. The one forgettable order was the Ma Po tofu. It was the only dish that remained unfinished at the end of our meal.
A return trip to Lao Ma La is inevitable for me. Next time, however, I'll probably just wrap a towel around my head and dine there by myself.
If you're going to eat here, be ready for some heat and spice. Now, I will state up front I can't handle a lot of spice, but I still enjoy it. I was enthused about this place since the initial reviews for Lao Ma La are generally positive. I ordered the stewed pork belly with bean curd. Â Was totally excited for that except... *womp womp* - five minutes later, "We're out of pork belly" so they substituted it with short ribs. Dang. My mouth was totally set on pork belly, and I have a feeling it would've been better if they had some. When we received the short ribs substitution, it didn't impress me much. We also ordered the dan dan noodles. It was fine, but there was a spice there that shouldn't be in dan dan noodles. I can't put my finger on it, but it was a little off. Now, to finish off this meh review (and to add more *womp womp* to this entry), I woke up the next morning pretty nauseous. Now, I'm not sure if the restaurant is 100% to blame, but I didn't feel icky until I had dinner there... and woke up the next morning feeling *really* icky. While Lao Ma La isn't terrible, I certainty won't be coming back any time soon. Service was fine, ambiance was okay (interesting lighting inside by the way), and the food was mediocre.
Review Source:I came in with high expectation and planned to eat their spicy hotpot. I was disappointed after we ate that. Don't get me wrong. The services were great and all meat and veggies served were fresh. The problem is that spicy hotpot.
The spicy hotpot with skewers is very popular in China. You get a huge pot with spicy broth, then basically quickly cook whichever meat or veggies you pick in the pot. I was very glad to see we could get that in Chicago.
The spicy broth here was freaking salty which destroyed our dinning experience. It made everything salty when you cook anything more than two seconds. The pot was not deep enough to put the everything on the skewer in the broth. We had to take the meat or veggie off the skewers and put these in the broth. What's the point of skewers then?
Two of us shared 5 meat skewers and 10 veggie ones plus the broth. The bill was higher than I expected. We would be better off ordering spicy fish with vegetables for sure.
Looks like other yelpers got better experience with spicy fish in a pan. I might give this place another try but definitely not the spicy hotpot.
I don't know people.. it's average and totally edible but I have to co-sign on Gary C's statements that having eaten at many if not all the Lao restaurants it's pretty much the same shit over and over again and it all really just tastes the same to be honest. I don't get the excitement over the dried chili chicken. My dad makes a very similar rendition growing up so I'm not having a seizure over how incredible itis, so to me it's not a must have dish you absolutely have to order. And again, it's not spicy here unless you're really super duper sensitive like a newborn infant. Organs on the menu are prepared fine, nothing I have to have again- all very familiar to me. I'd like to come back solo for the hot pot and give that a shot but I'm in no hurry. Maybe next winter or fall.
Review Source:Holy hotness! I'm not the biggest fan of super spicy food, but my friends wanted to try this place out. Dining companions ordered spicy fish, green beans, mapo tofu, and other entrees to share family style. Nothing really stood out to me except for the braised pork belly.
Please understand that I think my mother is the greatest cook EVER. If you ever get the privilege of meeting her, I guarantee you will agree. And at the age of 25, I still get lunchboxes (rice and stir fry) from her at least once a week. Don't judge me, I'm broke from working in social services and if someone wants to give me a free meal I will take it! Anyway, I've never had a pork belly dish that rivaled my mother's the way Lao Ma La does. The pork belly has a great balance of fatty, salty, and a little sweet and makes me reminisce about simpler times when I wasn't living off cereal and green tea on a daily basis. I don't know the English word for the vegetables that come with the braised pork, but even those are crazy delicious.
Since everyone else in the restaurant was doing hot-pot, I think we'll have to give that a shot next time. And I'll need about 4 orders of that pork belly too. Goodbye skinny jeans, back to living in yoga pants!
A packed house full of happy, sated customers on a Saturday night can't be wrong. This place has become surprisingly popular and one can easily understand why. The food is interesting and tasty and the addictiveness of Sichuan peppercorns probably helps as well.
I came here on a Saturday night with an eating partner/friend and we had an amazing meal. 75 percent of the other tables seemed to have ordered the spicy fish in a pan, and so we did too. It was huge; there were only the two of us, but we tackled that sucker along with two appetizers and left with no regrets.
And here I am today, still thinking about our meal. In fact I am obsessed. Earlier in the day, we had considered regular, old hotpot at one of the other placed. But to be honest I find hotpot bland and boring. I suggested Lao Ma La. I had been there before for lunch, and really enjoyed their pork belly with mashed garlic, spicy boiled fish, and a few assorted skewers.
But this time it was dinner, and I was with a friend who is an enthusiastic eater like me. Everyone around us seemed to be enjoying their gargantuan pans of fish and adding ingredients to their pans like a hotpot, so we did the same. We started off with the Never Forget Chicken and Dan Dan Noodles for our appetizers. Â Both were superb.
Then came our pan of fish in a spicy broth. To it, we added tofu, enoki mushrooms, beansprouts, shrimp and vermicelli glass noodles. It was amazing! I am obsessed with this meal!
Having a full bar at the place was nice as well. I'm not sure how many other people ordered drinks, but we had a cocktail each and they were nicely done. The service was attentive, contrary to what some other reviewers have said.
I really enjoyed myself. It's a fun, festive environment. There were a number of group tables where friends had obviously gotten together to eat. The pans of fish make for great group or family style shared meals. At one point a group of twenty or so came in and they were accommodated at a long table along one wall. Clearly they were about to have a great time and eat some great food!
ONE WORD - Terrible!!! I have had hot pot many times before and found it really good with great broth and very good cuts of meat.
At Lao Ma La the hot pot had the same spicy flavor and when you added different meats in they were indelible. If you are looking for flavorful food, go some place else.
The staff too just waited around, played in their iPhones and chatted - they were very polite when they came to the table, but for the most part were hard to get a hold of when you actually needed to order or to get water.
Disappointed in Tony this time!
I love hotpot. Â I've had it in China several times and I have had it in the States too.
This place has great spicy soup base. Â They are generous with the red peppers and the mala sauce that gives the soup that numbing quality too. Â Very legit soup.
Unfortunately that's where the good stuff ends. Â The problems? Â Plentiful, and unfortunately, mostly logistic that lead to an unpleasant hot pot experience. Â Â
1) The pot is too high, the tables too narrow. Â So you don't think of this as an issue until it is. Â These pots rest on top of a table-top stove that is mobile. Â The flexibility is nice, but this means that you're cooking food a good 8 inches off the table. Â The table is so narrow that you are also very close to the boiling water. Â This creates spatter issues when cooking. Â This is particularly pronounced when you cook noodles in the soup. Â There is no easy way to get the cooked noodles onto your plate (they give you plates...no bowls) without extending your arm way far, then noodles spatter hot sauce onto your face as they drop back into the boiling soup (it got into my eye and stung!) and then they fall in a heap onto your plate and the questionable table surface. Â All in all unpleasant and we both got oily stains on our shirts because of this.
2) They put the meat on skewers. Â This sounds interesting and sort of like fondue. Â However, the skewer sticks do not fit into the pot squarely which means that you have to push the food more compactly onto the sticks. Â But this means that things get cooked unevenly, like meat, because it's bunched on the skewer. Â In the end we wound up taking the things off the sticks to cook them like normal hot pot.
3) Cuts of meat too thick - We had beef and lamb among other things. Â Both were way too thick for hot pot which has always been thinner shaved meat. Â This was unpleasant in the thickness. Â
All in all I think there are other places that do more streamlined hot pot. Â We didn't try the other foods.
Damn good food, per usual from yet another restaurant opened by the great Tony Hu. Â He's taking over Chicago, and in my opinion- with good reason.
The concept of this one is simple: spicy food. Â I tend to gravitate towards Lao Beijing simply because I love the balance the menu there provides. Â There are plenty of spicy items on that menu there, but plenty of non-spicy, very tasty food on offer too. Â That's not what you'll find here at Lao Ma La though. Â Many of his other region-specific places (Hunnan, Yunan, Sze Chuan, etc.) tend to be focused on spiciness, based on the different styles and flavors of spices and peppers from the different regions, Lao Ma La gets straight to the point- a greatest hits, if you will, of spicy, traditional Chinese cooking.
Big winners were the following:
Pork belly with dried bean curd
"Never Forget Chicken" (also is good advice)
Wood ear mushrooms with wild chilies
"Husband and Wife Lung Strips"
House special fish with green chilies (probably the best dish of the night)
We enjoyed this place, very much so. Lao Mala has taken over the space of Lure Izakaya which has since shuttered. Oddly enough, every establishment who had been in this location never survived more than a year (e.g. Lure Izakaya, Mulan, etc). Now let's see if Tony Hu can "unjinx" this spot with his new opening, Lao Mala, since all his restaurants are known to be golden.
If you love spicy food, then you will love the food here. Everything we ordered was so flavorful and though very spicy, the spiciness did not take away the full flavors of the dishes. For appetizers, we got the dan dan noodle and vermicelli with spicy and sour sauce as appetizers-- both made a great start to our meal. We also got the Never Forget Chicken (yeah, a pretty descriptive name of telling us what the dish is huh) which is a cold dish with chicken slices swimming in red sauce and chilli oil but don't let that scare you. I LOVEDx2 the grilled fish in a pan. It is basically a whole grilled fish served in an industrial-looking metal pan (which looks exactly like those you see in cafeterias or catering!) and brought to the table. The grilled fish is submerged with lots of red spicy sauce/broth inside the pan. The entire pan is placed on a portable burner, like those used for hotpot. I'm still dreaming about the fish. On the menu there is cumin beef but we asked if they could make us cumin lamb instead, which they happily obliged. Laden with chilli and chilli seeds all over the lamb, it was also very flavorful. The only non-spicy item we got was the sichuan green beans which I recommend.
This place has hotpot too, if you're in the mood for it.
Service was pretty good and friendly. Oddly enough, when we asked for hot tea (gotta have some tea to wash down all that chilli oil!), the server told us they don't have hot tea....... but they have hot water. What?! Which self-respecting Chinese restaurant (and one owned by Tony Hu) doesn't serve hot Chinese tea?
After my second visit, I feel I have enough for a review. Atmosphere is a little different to some of the other restaurants as they took over a space that was built out to be a little more trendy/upscale. Most, if not all, the dishes are spicy, which is just great as far as I am concerned. I only look at the spicy options at his other restaurants anyway. Tried a couple of appetizers which were served cold. one was pork belly in a spicy sauce and the other was chicken in a spicy sauce. Cannot say enough about the sauces they came with. They were really outstanding. As far as the meat, not so much. I now know with certainty that pork belly should not be eaten cold. Will say the same for the chicken. Wonder if you could request that they cook it for you or that they just bring you the sauce. The house spicy pots are outstanding. Tried the beef and the chicken and they were both delicious. Could not get enough! Also tried the string bean mini spicy wok and it was fantastic. Finally tried the chengdu spicy pork. Very similar to the pan fried sliced pork that you can get at LSC, but the pork was more belly-like on this one. It was also fabulous. Like they do at the Uptown LSC, they give you very small plates for your food. Not sure I get it and definitely not a fan. First time we struggled with the small plates, this time i asked for a larger plate from the get-go and they brought me one. Much better. go there and enjoy this wonderful food. Ask for a bigger plate and pig out!
Review Source:I went to try Lao Ma La last night, and I was a bit apprehensive about trying the hot pot after a not-so-pleasant experience at a different hot pot place in Chinatown...but my friend convinced me to try it since it does seem to be the specialty here. So we got the hotpot, some skewers, and gave it a shot...and I was pleasantly surprised. We opted to go with the spicy soup base, and I tried beef, lamb, and squid skewers. The quality of the meats was higher than I anticipated, and the spicy soup base added a lot of great flavor to the meats without overpowering.
We also tried some of the grilled skewers, and they were great as well; cooked to the correct temperature and seasoned well without overdoing it.
We also tried the dried chili chicken and the braised pork belly; the chicken was fairly spicy (but not overpowering), and had a variety of vegetables like cabbage, baby bok choy, celery, and onion thrown in, served in a large steel bowl. I really liked this dish, although they seemed to haphazardly dice up the chicken meaning little shards of bones in a couple of pieces of chicken...that's something they should work on. The pork belly was fine, but nothing that will keep the customers coming back.
Given the experience, I'd recommend that people go with the hotpot and grilled skewers here (meat skewers are a reasonable $1.50-2 each).
Maybe we didn't order the right things. Â I did notice that many authoritative-seeming (i.e., Chinese national) patrons ordered the hotpot, in this case an unusual rectangular-shaped "pot" over a flame / heating element, with hotpot ingredients available by the skewer. Â At least I guess this was the hotpot, although to me there would seem to be a strong stir-fry aspect to cooking in such a large, shallow vessel. Â (How do these confident, in-the-know patrons become in-the-know, three days after the restaurant's opening? Â Anyway I digress.)
The Ma Po Tofu was a great disappointment, totally not in keeping with the "Ma La" (spicy) in the restaurant's name. Â I suspect we got the dumbed-down version. Â I hate when that happens. Â (I wonder what is communicated to the cooks in the kitchen prior to this kind of thing happening. Â Do they get a note saying, "Round Eye at Table 3!! Â No Szechuan peppercorns!! Â Dishwater-level heat only!!!")
PRO: The thinly-sliced pork belly in garlic mash appetizer was yummy. Â I could just drink that dark red, sweet, oily, soy and chili broth on its own. Â The "mini-wok" dishes also looked interesting -- you get a small wok full of ingredients that presumably were just wokk-ed minutes ago.
Anyway, this "Lao" restaurant of Tony Hu is different insofar as it's not concentrating on any particular region of China. Â Instead, its purported focus is on a collection of spicy ("ma la") dishes in general. Â I suspect this tack might make it the weakest of Hu's restaurants -- as in he's just throwing together a patchwork of supposedly greatest, supposedly spiciest hits, but it's just a lazy marketing gimmick geared towards filling up available real estate and attracting tourists drawn to the Tony Hu brand.
Stop phoning it in, Tony. Â
I do understand this restaurant is new.  I will revise my review if I visit it again, but who knows when that will be, as there are, like, a dozen "Lao" restaurants that  are either opening up or are already proven and demonstrably better than Lao Ma La.
When will Emperor Tony Hu stop the madness??
The answer: not yet.
The latest of the Lao clan is Ma La, which loosely translates to "spicy" (or so my father says...) and it doesn't let down.
If you've eaten at one of the many Lao restaurants, you'll notice something interesting, they revolve around the same three ingredients: oil, chili peppers, and peppercorns. Â Seriously, at all of the restaurants, 96.325% of the dishes have any combination of those three ingredients. You might ask, "Is that a bad thing?"
In short: yes.
Why? Well, there comes a point in time during your life in the Hu Dynasty that everything starts to taste the same. I crap you not, we ordered four different dishes at Lao Ma La, and they all looked eerily similar, were fragrant with nostril-burning peppers, and tasted so much alike. Yes, the ma po tofu, Szechuan-style string beans, spicy chicken wings in mini wok, and combination seafood all, and I mean all, tasted the same. But that's not to say my family and I didn't enjoy it.
We also ordered pot stickers, something that we have ordered at each of Hu's restaurants (it's interesting to see how different they all are, even if they all come from the same mind). This particular set is served with a soy sauce-based sauce mixed with chili oil. Not too spicy, and it's an interesting addition to the not-pan-fried pot stickers.
What made me very upset, however, was the service. Maybe I'm accustomed to Chairman Mao's soldiers from Hunan, but this very young staff at Ma La did not know what they were doing. Part of me said that Hu is just cranking out restaurants because property is available, without properly training his staff in hospitality and service. I know, you're reading this and telling me that you don't go to Chinatown for service. But let's be real, if you're going out, you expect some level of anything. I just didn't get much today. But maybe that's because Ma La just opened this week. Only time will tell, I suppose..
A few notes:
Hot pot is served in the late afternoon and evening (boo..).
During it's grand opening, you will receive 20% off if you pay in cash.
They are still unpacking stuff, so pardon the mess.
Bring  tissue, because you'll likely need to blow your nose a few times during your meal.
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